Union exclusion and legal discrimination blocked wealth-building that a credit cannot retroactively restore

Evidence

As for me, I’ve been lucky—and the luckiest thing that ever happened to me was having James and Dottie Brown as my parents. And James and Dottie, who faced overt and legal discrimination throughout their lives, were lucky, too: My father, prohibited from entering the plumbers’ union, found a job with Mr. Gelman, who helped my parents buy their three-family home. When he did get a job with the union (once legal discrimination was outlawed), it provided him with a pension that supports my mother to this day. At this point in my life I won’t benefit from a wealth credit, and now, neither will Miss Dottie. When I think about all the years she balanced budgets, made money stretch, and saved for rainy days, all so my sister and I could succeed, it’s hard for me to advocate for a tax credit that she will not get. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 559

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete mechanism example of how exclusion from an institution (plumbers’ union) blocked homeownership and pensions — echoes the reader’s other institutional-exclusion sources like the diamond bourse and union histories.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the proposed wealth tax credit have an age/cohort cutoff that structurally excludes the very generation most harmed by legal discrimination?